


Written Word

by Biting Words (Reyna_is_epic)



Series: Soulmate AUs [1]
Category: Frozen (Disney Movies)
Genre: A lot - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Canon Compliant, Disney is a coward, Elsa-centric (Disney), F/F, Lesbian Character, Lesbian Elsa (Disney), Lesbians, Magic, Maren is big dumb, Names, Romance, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate AU, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Spirits, anna curses, elsa is baby, enchanted forest, let Anna say fuck 2k19, let anna say fuck, mostly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:08:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21785743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reyna_is_epic/pseuds/Biting%20Words
Summary: When Elsa turned twelve years old the spirits did not bestow on her the name of her soulmate. Instead, small golden diamonds inscribed themselves into the base of her left wrist and ice wound itself around her entire body in protest.ORThe one in which I wanted to write a soulmate AU, but realized that Northuldran writing, from what we've seen, is weird as heck and is more hieroglyphic than alphabetic.
Relationships: Anna & Elsa (Disney), Anna/Kristoff (Disney), Elsa & Kristoff (Disney), Elsa/Honeymaren (Disney), Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: Soulmate AUs [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1742059
Comments: 64
Kudos: 975





	1. I

When Elsa turned twelve years old the spirits did not bestow on her the name of her soulmate. Instead, small diamonds inscribed themselves into the base of her left wrist and ice wound itself around her entire body in protest. 

She’d stayed like that for hours, curled into a ball in the center of her bed and run cold fingers over the diamonds like she could somehow turn them into something legible, something meaningful, something that could give her hope. The golden crystals had just stared back at her and, eventually, her mother had to pour hot water over her head to get the ice to thaw enough to touch her.

There were only two types of soulmarks and everyone knew them. There were the ones that told you the name of the one person in your life you’d always be able to trust, and the ones that marked you for what you were: alone. 

The first type was the widely accepted version, the one that women cooed over and men showed off with pride, the one that people wrote books and poetry and songs about. It was the type that filled people with hope and tales of true love's kiss.

The second type was rarely spoken of, slipped between quiet mouths and under breaths like a curse of the damned. It was the mark of the wicked, and those who bore them hid them underneath sleeves and armbands. Anything to keep the judging eyes away.

To tell the difference was simple: the first were names written in the hand of who they belonged to, sometimes elegant and graceful and other times crumpled and smushed together. 

The second were pictures. Immovable, impassable, meaningless pictures. Just like the diamonds inscribed in Elsa’s wrist.

She started wearing gloves the morning after her twelfth birthday.

~

When Anna turned twelve the castle was a bustle of activity that Elsa had not seen since they closed the gates. Maids and castle-servers rushed from room to room in gaggles of life, talking and laughing and exchanging stories as the young princess mooned over the black smudge that had presented itself on her wrist. 

To Elsa, it looked like someone had poured an entire inkwell over her sister’s wrist, but everyone else insisted it was a name.

“It starts with a K!” Anna had squealed that morning, loud enough to startle Elsa into freezing her entire room into a miniature ice-rink and knock her father directly off of his feet. 

Despite that, no one had been able to make out what it said. It was certain that it started with a k- the letter was printed so boldly that Elsa was certain it could be seen from the top of the North Mountain- but any letter after that was a complete mystery. It was like the writer had only bothered to learn the first letter of his name and made up the rest.

However, it was enough. Anna had a soulmate. Someone that she’d meet at some point in her life and would be able to tell her what that godawful signature meant. Anna was blessed, she was excited, she was normal.

She knew that her parents probably didn’t mean it, but she saw the look of relief that passed over their faces after confirming their younger daughter’s signature for themselves. Elsa had never been normal, that much was obvious with the fact she could shoot Ice out of herself if she sneezed too hard, but she knew that the fact she was soulmate-less weighed on them just as much, if not more, than her ice did. 

Anna would find someone, it was written on her skin.

Elsa’s wrist burned and she locked herself in her room with little more than a soft congratulation. Ice was already creeping past her ankles.

~

Elsa was eighteen and her parents were dead.

The news came long after they died, she knew that. Weeks at the least, months was more likely. Their ship was due to return two months after they left and it never did, all they could do was assume the worst and with each passing day with still no ship in sight that reality became more and more clear.

Anna held out hope-- of course she did she was the human embodiment of sunshine and stubbornness-- for a good three months after they were due to return. 

Elsa’s hope had died with her sister’s memories of her magic.

They had a burial, a stupid, ceremonious thing considering there was nothing to bury, and Elsa shut the world out as tightly as she could. Anna tried to come to her, tried to comfort her, to say something to her, to draw support and give it in return.

“We only have each other,” she’d whispered from the other side of her bedroom door, and Elsa wanted to grab the girl by her shoulders and shake her until she was sick.

“I have no one!” she wanted to scream because, well, she didn’t. With their parents gone-- the only people in the world who understood the constant stress she was under, the only people in the world besides a group of goddamn trolls in the mountains who knew about her powers-- she was alone.

She was alone, and she would always _be_ alone.

Her world was a blanket of ice and snow and cold. A numbing, chilling, biting cold that would’ve killed her if she were able to feel it.

All she could feel was the throbbing pain of the diamonds inscribed into her wrist.

~

Anna was eighteen and presenting a man with Red-hair and horrifying mutton-chops to her, her arm wound around his like it belonged there. She was grinning, lips spread wide enough to make her concerned about the muscles in her cheeks, and wouldn’t stop bouncing on the tips of her toes.

“Elsa! Meet Prince Kyle Hans of the Southern Isles!” She squealed, red-faced and shrill. Kyle’s eye twitched slightly at the volume, but otherwise, he remained composed and cordial. “He’s my soulmate!”

Elsa’s heart dropped down to her toes. The ice she’d been restraining the entire night crept into her chest to take its place.

“What?”

“It is an honor to meet you, Queen Elsa,” Hans bowed appropriately and took her hand before she could fully process the gesture, kissing the back of it.

Something in Elsa’s body physically shrunk away.

“Hello…?” she mumbled softly, still trying to compute that Anna had managed to meet her soulmate on the one day that the gates were open. 

“We’ve come to ask for your blessing," Anna whispered conspiratorially.

Elsa’s gut did a somersault. 

“Pardon?”

“We’re getting married!” Anna and Hans said together like they’d rehearsed it on the way here.

Her brows furrowed. No, that wasn’t possible. She’d seen that signature it was not one that someone born of nobility-- especially not a son of the Southern Isles, one of the biggest kingdoms this side of Europe-- would have. Much less one named Kyle. Kyle? The name wasn’t even long enough to be Anna's signature. 

“Anna, can I talk to you for a moment, in private?” she asked, trying her best to sound in control of the situation, but if the crack of her voice after 'moment' was anything to go by she hadn’t exactly succeeded. Unfortunately, Anna didn’t take the hint.

“What… no... No. If you have something to say to me, you can say it to the both of us.” She puffed out her chest, straightening to her full height, still a few centimeters shorter than herself. Elsa’s stomach was still trying to recover from Hans’s unprompted kiss on her hand, this sudden display of stubbornness wasn’t helping.

“Fine,” she huffed through gritted teeth, “you can’t marry a man you just met.”

Anna stared at her like she’d just told her the sky was green.

“We’re soulmates, Elsa!” She protested and Elsa fought down a sudden (unhelpful, unwarranted, and unfair) pang of jealousy.

“Soulmate or not,” she growled, teeth getting progressively tighter together. “You need time to build a relationship with someone, that can’t happen in just one night.”

“How would you know?!” Anna snapped, taking a step forward and into her space. “All you ever do is shut people out! You talk all high-and-mighty, but you know less about building relationships than I do.”

The words would hurt more if Elsa didn’t already know them to be true.

“Anna. You are being hasty and careless.” the words pushed past her lips and she might as well have punched her sister in the face from the way her expression contorted at the words. Ice was beginning to form beneath her feet, she needed to act quickly. “That’s enough for tonight, close the gates.”

Guards and servants began ushering civilians out the door, but Anna moved quicker than any of them could. She lunged, grabbing her hand in an attempt to stop her, but her glove just came away.

Elsa’s entire body shrunk, narrowed, concentrated into that one point of skin, unleashed to the air for the first time in years without her express permission.

“Elsa, please I can’t live like this!” Anna’s voice was far away and murky, she could barely hear her words.

“Then leave.” Her mouth moved without her permission. All her concentration zeroed in on keeping the building blizzard inside.

“What are you so afraid of-”

“Enough, Anna.” She had to get out of there, now.

“No! You’ve ignored me for thirteen years, you can stick around for one minu-”

“I said, ENOUGH!”

It was only later, locked in her palace of ice she’d created herself, she realized the hand Anna had freed from its cloth prison was the one with the diamonds inscribed in its wrist.

~

Anna thawed, and so did Arendale. It was a miracle, really. ‘An act of True Love’ was a concept often reserved for soulmates and soulmates alone. (The fact that Anna’s actual soulmate, a kind young icer named Kristoff, was present for the affair did not escape her.) It had worked with only her sisterly act of desperation and that was a testament to itself.

It was also a testament to what Elsa was. Soulmate-less, and open for the entire world to see. If she were to put the gloves back on she’d just feel ridiculous and if she were to wear a wrist covering of any sort she felt it would serve the same purpose. She was done with hiding, it had done her no good in the past and she was certain it would do her no good in the future.

She was the queen and after all the havoc she’d caused during her coronation, she felt the obligation to at least be honest with her people.

Of course, that meant being honest with Anna as well.

They’d already established an open-door policy with each other, (It was a must if she were honest. Just the idea of closing a door on Anna ever again made chills run down her spine and something heavy settle in the pit of her stomach.) but this was something that required more than an open door. It required an open heart, and that was something that Elsa wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to fully offer to her sister.

Anna, for her part, was very patient about the whole thing. She waited at least two weeks before bringing it up and, when she finally did, waited for Elsa’s response with all the patience and grace that their mother had tried to teach her over the years.

“So um… I noticed your… arm…” she still hadn’t learned how to be subtle though.

Elsa chuckled fondly and finished signing the report she’d been reading over from the chief of infrastructure. Turns out a random cold spell in the middle of what was supposed to be Arendale’s warm season could do a lot of damage.

“I was wondering when you’d ask about that.”

Anna flushed slightly. 

“Am I that predictable?”

“You’ve always been curious.” Elsa settled her quill back in its inkwell and turned to face her sister. She was always struck with how much like their mother Anna looked, and today was no exception. She’d even selected a purple dress remarkably similar to their mother’s preferred attire.

“Alright, ask away,” she prompted, receiving a small smile from her sister, but it was tempered with nerves. She hoped that their relationship would improve given time and honesty and Anna would no longer look so unsure of herself when alone in a room with her, but time was proving to be a slow process at the least.

“Uh… well, uhm… can I… see it?” She wrung her hands together, the right crossing over the left and trailing the thumb over the dark black smudge on her left wrist.

Elsa forced down a chill of sadness that threatened to fill the room if she didn’t, and outstretched her hand, to show her sister the golden diamonds that had been there for nine years. Anna paused, just for a second but long enough for Elsa to wonder if it was such a good idea to display her status so openly, then she took the hand in both of hers to bring the mark up to her face for inspection.

Elsa was loathe to admit it, but it had been years since she’d allowed another human being to touch her. Sure, she’d hugged Anna before this exact moment, but she was still getting used to the fact that she could touch her sister without fearing that she’d turn into an Anna shaped popsicle every time she did.

It still made her feel like it was something sacred, something that should be saved for special occasions or as shows of gratitude, but Anna gave physical affection so freely… not for the first time she wondered just how different her and Anna’s relationships with their parents were. (and just how much of that was their fault and how much of that was hers.)

“It’s so…”

“Simple, I know,” Elsa tried for humor, though it wasn’t her strong suit and she doubted it ever would be.

Anna shook her head, though a smile did curl her lips slightly.

“No, I just… it looks hand-drawn.”

Elsa frowned, glancing down at the symbols like they might’ve somehow changed over the course of nine years. She saw none, just empty gold crystals staring back at her.

“It does?” She questioned.

Anna nodded, carefully tracing each diamond with her index finger.

“Well, maybe drawn isn’t the right word. It looks a little more like… stitching, maybe? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Yes, well people without soulmates aren’t exactly common, Anna,” She said flippantly.

The corners of Anna’s mouth pulled downwards and her eyes slid up to meet hers.

“Soulmate or no soulmate, you’re still my sister.” Her grip moved from her wrist to hold her fingers down into her palm. “This doesn’t change that.”

For the first time since it appeared, Elsa’s wrist didn’t feel like another weight to carry around her already strained neck.

~

Three years later Kristoff came to her with a nervous smile on his face and hands clasped in front of his chest like he was trying to physically hold himself together. He asked for her blessing and Elsa laughed so hard she started ‘flurrying,’ as Anna had taken to affectionately calling it.

“Kristoff, you’ve had my blessing since we met,” she managed to splutter out after a good few minutes of laughter, though the convulsions had yet to fully leave her and tears started streaming down her face not too long ago.

Kristoff was her sister’s true soulmate and, truth be told, she would’ve been able to tell that without seeing either of their soulmarks. Anna’s stubbornness was matched step for step with Kristoff’s patience and his silly relationship with his reindeer wasn’t any stranger than Anna’s kinship with Olaf. 

(Elsa nearly had a stroke when she realized that she was apparently capable of creating sentient life with snow, though at this point it was kind of old news. The fact she could create sentient life with sneezing, on the other hand, was another matter entirely and one she didn’t want to examine too closely.)

Seeing the mark itself emblazoned on Kristoff’s wrist was nothing more than a confirmation of what she already knew, but it was a reassuring one. Hans, the bastard, had tried to fake her sister’s signature across his wrist before his downfall. Evidently, he was like her, soulmate-less, but a different kind of soulmate-less: soulless. Born with no marks at all, wrists bare and open, he had taken matters into his own hands when he saw the opportunity to inherit what was never his and had scrawled Anna’s name upon his wrist before their first meeting. It was a good imitation if she were honest, but it had failed to encapsulate Anna’s frantic hand. Anna’s signature had never been as neat as was proper for a princess: small and pressed together with little space between each letter like she was afraid she’d run out of room.

That was the signature tucked in the crook of Kristoff’s wrist, small and safe from prying eyes. That was the signature she felt safe leaving her sister in the hands of. So when Kristoff came to her asking for her blessing she offered the back of her right arm with little more than a grin and a teasing ‘you hurt her, I kill you,’ that held absolutely none of the malice it was supposed to.

That night she looked at the mark drawn across the back of her right wrist and traced Kristoff’s signature with cold fingertips. He was her family now, she knew that- had known that since he and Anna started seriously dating- but seeing his signature plastered across her skin in ceremonious ink was something she was never sure she’d get to see. But, well, she was the head of their house now, and she would have to partake in all of the traditions that came with it.

It was strange, she decided, that after all this time she’d finally get to see a real name on her body, and it wasn’t even one that belonged to her.

She fell asleep that night with her left wrist tucked against her heart.

~

Three months later she wakes up with a haunting song on the breeze and a burning in her left wrist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I just wanted to kinda add a quick rule set for how this particular Soulmate AU works bc I saw some people getting confused by it and I thought about it for way too long for me to just keep my mouth shut. SO:
> 
> 1\. At the age of 12 everyone spontaneously manifests a signature on their left wrist which belongs to their soulmate. 
> 
> 2\. The signature is the 'most commonly used' signature, meaning if the person writes their name in multiple alphabets then the more commonly used one will be the one to show up on the other's wrist (i.e: since Iduna lived with Arendellians much longer than she lived with the Northuldra and probably met Agnarr around, if not before, he reached the age of twelve, he'd probably have an Arendellian signature on his wrist.)
> 
> 3\. There are two types of soulmarks: those that show your soulmate, and those who possess no marks at all. (Elsa's "cursed mark", if you hadn't already guessed, just means that her soulmate writes with a different alphabet than hers.)
> 
> Now the rest of these are little details I wanted to include but couldn't find a place for:
> 
> \- Not all soulmates are romantic, all soulmates are friendly though, it is meant to be a positive relationship, that doesn't mean soulmates can't hurt each other though
> 
> \- (This applies only to Arendellian and other European cultures)As seen at the end of this chapter, when one half of a soul-pairing wants to propose to the other they must get the permission of their soulmate's head of house and sign the back of that person's wrist with ceremonious ink. A similar ink is used when the couple is married, but this kind is permanent (kinda like a tattoo). The couple signs the insides of each other's right wrists to mark them as whole for life.
> 
> (More to be added as I see fit)


	2. II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'What if you’re not soulmate-less after all?' some desperate, childish part of her whispers.
> 
> She mumbles to herself not to get her hopes up, but the fact remains that the closer they get to the forest, the more her wrist burns.

“You’ve been hearing voices, and you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t want to worry you.” Elsa pleads, but it is weak and she knows it. Anna’s face has set into that stubborn scowl that only comes about when she feels something has been done with the direct intention of hurting her.

“Well consider me worried!”

“Anna,” Kristoff murmurs placatingly, reaching out to wrap an arm around her shoulders. Anna’s shoulders rise in response but, when he refuses to let go, drop accompanied with a heavy sigh.

“What are the voices telling you?”

“Voice actually,” she mutters, trying not to question how weird this conversation must sound to anyone who doesn’t know that she is distinctly magical and these kinds of things are considered somewhat normal. “Just one, and I think it’s calling me north.”

“The North Mountain?” Kristoff questions. Elsa shakes her head.

“No. No, it feels… further than that.” 

The ground starts rumbling, and several cries of ‘Now What?!’ ring through the already anxious townspeople. Fortunately, Elsa recognizes this rumbling.

“Grandpappy!” Anna cries and runs to meet the approaching tribe of rock-trolls, Elsa just a step behind. Grandpappy springs from his final roll to land on a raised platform of rock.

“I hope you are prepared for what you’ve done, Elsa. Angry spirits are not something to be taken lightly.” He doesn’t quite sound angry, but he has an air of disapproval around him that makes her feel like Father has returned from the grave to lecture her about her recklessness.

“What do we do now?” Anna breaks in.

Grandpappy frowns. “Let me see what I can see.” The easy swirl of mist that surrounds his fingertips is simultaneously something familiar and completely foreign. It feels like a lifetime ago that they met for the first time. Slowly it forms into an imitation of Arendelle’s castle. 

“Everything is not what it seems,” the mist changes to become two tribes of people, a sword and stick cross over one another, “a wrong must be righted. You must go to the enchanted forest, if not then…” the mist abruptly cuts out. Grandpappy’s bushy brows furrow together. “I see no future.”

“No future…” Anna’s voice is soft with horror.

“When one can see no future the only thing left to do is the next right thing.”

Elsa straightens. Unconsciously, her right-hand crosses over to rub against the diamonds on her left.

“I have to go to the Enchanted Forest and find what’s calling me. It has to be connected to all of this.”

“I’m coming too.” Anna’s scowling face stops inches away from her own.

“Anna, no. I have my powers to protect me, you don’t.”

“Excuse me. I climbed the north mountain, survived a frozen-heart, saved you from my shitty ex-boyfriend and did all of that without powers. I think I’ll be fine.”

Elsa hates that she has a point.

“Kristoff’s coming too.”

“Wait-”

“I’ll drive!”

~

The closer they get to the Enchanted Forest the more certain she is that whatever is going on with her soulmark is directly connected with the voice. 

_What if you’re not soulmate-less after all?_ some desperate, childish part of her whispers.

She mumbles to herself not to get her hopes up, but the fact remains that the closer they get to the forest, the more her wrist burns. 

She’d checked the diamonds before they left, they showed no obvious changes but she was reminded of old-wives-tales. Soulmates who had such deep connections that when one of them was in danger the mark would burn for the other. It was impossible, of course. What kind of alphabet would look like the shapes printed on her arm?

She’s getting herself worked up for nothing, it would only lead to disappointment in the end.

The song still calls to her despite it all.

~

The trees rustle unsettlingly and Elsa barely manages to shove Olaf behind her before bodies drop from seemingly nowhere, staffs raised threateningly. To their right, the clang of swords rings through the already tense air and the tribespeople visibly stiffen at the sound, grips tightening.

“This doesn’t concern you, Lieutenant.” a woman, she must be the tribe’s leader, glares at the approaching group. Elsa’s eyes widen at the sight of them.

“They’re Arendellian soldiers.” Anna voices her thoughts.

“They’ve been trapped in here this entire time?” Kristoff questions.

An older dark-skinned man steps forward, sword pointed in their direction, but his gaze is firmly on the tribe’s leader.

“Encroaching on my dance-space, Yelena?” There’s a bit of amusement in his voice, but it's hidden under a hostility so old it’s almost fondness. The woman in question rolls her eyes with enough force to knock someone off of their feet.

“Focus, you two.” A young woman with dark hair and eyes steps forwards, her staff is still pointed at them and the threat hangs clear in the air. Elsa’s left wrist flares with heat and she reaches down to cover it with her other hand. The young woman’s staff twitches, her stance widening to provide an advantage if she has to lunge forwards. 

Something in Elsa’s stomach does a somersault and before she can properly think of a solution to the problem at hand, ice spreads outwards from her feet.

Multiple people’s feet slip out from beneath them, including the dark-haired girl who falls backward on top of a similar-looking boy. The Lieutenant and Yelena topple over together, landing back to back. Yelps of terror fill the clearing and Anna elbows her sharply in the side.

“Ow.”

“What was that for?” Anna hisses.

“That was magic…” the lieutenant’s eyes are wide, hands braced against the ice and propping himself upwards, sword forgotten. “Who are you people?”

Before she can stop him, Olaf skates forwards across the ice and a couple dozen gazes snap to him with a mixture of horror, shock, and awe.

“It’s really quite simple…”

...

The little salamander in her hands licks its eye and she can’t stop the laugh from escaping her chest.

“Am I supposed to know what that means?” 

It chirps in response.

She laughs again, it's the first time in a long time that she’s felt this… whole. She’s not entirely sure what that means, but her chest feels like something is slotting into place, something she didn’t even know was out. The little creature slowly cocks its head to the side and crawls a little further down her hands to nose the cuff of her left sleeve downwards.

The golden diamonds glisten in the misty light. No longer just imbedded in her skin like an old tattoo, but shiny and bright. Elsa’s brows furrow.

“What…?”

“Elsa!”

A weight slams into her back and her new little friend goes skittering out of her hand and off into the forest, a chirp of surprise following him.

“Anna…” she whirls around to try and quell the force of nature that just tried to take her off of her feet.

“Are you okay? Did you get burned? Is your dress intact? What was that thing in your hand? You weren’t just about to follow it were you-”

Elsa catches Anna’s face between her hands, abruptly cutting off her tirade. 

“You can’t just follow me into fire.”

Anna’s squished cheeks struggle to turn into a scowl.

“Then don’t run into fire.” she reaches up and pulls her hands away, scowl still in place but with tears threatening to spill out of her eyes. “You’re not being careful!”

A pang of guilt rings through her chest.

“I’m sorry.” Frantically, she searches for something to make the situation better, to comfort her sister before she either starts crying or she does by proxy. She catches a glimpse of a piece of fabric poking out of Anna’s bag. “Here, let’s just calm down and regroup a little, okay?” She tugs out their mother’s scarf and wraps it around Anna’s shoulders.

“Where did you get that?” A voice breaks in and both of the sisters glance up to meet the gaze of the same young dark-haired woman from before. The similar-looking man appears beside her.

“That’s a Northuldra scarf.”

Elsa’s breath stills inside her lungs and it feels like pieces have fallen into place. _Of course,_ why else would she be the way she is.

“It was our Mother’s…” Anna’s voice is still hinging on defensive, but Elsa doesn’t have the time to comprehend it. Her hand latches onto her sister’s and she’s dragging her across the still-frozen ground, back towards one particular statue made of ice.

“Anna, look,” she manages to wheeze out once they’ve found the statue once more, but her breath is sharp and cold. It feels like her lungs won’t expand.

Anna’s fingers hover just above the statues cheeks, but Elsa isn’t looking at the statue. She’s staring at her sister. Her sister who has always looked so much like their mother. Who has the same nose and chin as the Northuldra. Anna’s breath stills in the air, the puffs no longer turning white in the cold.

“Our mother was Northuldra…”

~

“Mind if I join you?”

Elsa slowly tears her eyes away from her mother’s scarf-- the last time she’d really examined the cloth had been after she’d accepted her parents death, though at the time she’d held onto her father’s sash just as tightly. Now, looking at the fabric in her hands she can’t help but wonder how she never guessed it wasn’t Arendellian in origin. Arendellian fabric never felt like this, and the patterns in the stitching don’t remind her of any designs she’s seen in other pieces-- and looks up to meet the gaze of the same young woman from earlier.

“No, no of course not.” 

Anna had run off to talk to Lieutenant Mattias and she honestly isn’t sure what Kristoff is up to other than making a fool of himself. (The man has been trying to propose for three months now, it’s getting kind of ridiculous.)

The woman drops down beside her, careful not to disturb the young reindeer who had decided to take a nap on her earlier.

“Honeymaren.” She offers a hand. 

Elsa blinks, she’s still not the most well versed in social interaction, but this feels strangely formal given her introduction to the tribe earlier. Then again, if her social interaction with other Arendellians is bad, who knows how terrible she is at Northuldran customs.

“Elsa,” she takes the hand, a smile tugging at the corner of her lips, “but you already knew that.”

“Eh.” Honeymaren shakes the hand twice before releasing it and offering a wide, crooked grin. “Most of your little snowman’s story went over my head.”

“That’s... probably for the best.” That little stunt with the ice castle on the North mountain still kept her awake far too long into the night.

Honeymaren’s laugh is as warm and sweet as her namesake.

“Something you don’t want me to know about?” She asks between giggles.

“I love Olaf, but he can get rather… enthusiastic… in his recollection of events.” She watches as a smirk pulls across the other woman’s features

“So you didn’t construct an entire ice castle in one night?”

Color flushes along Elsa’s cheeks. “I thought you said most of it went over your head.”

There’s that laugh again, and gosh Elsa’s never had much of a problem with temperature before so why does she feel so hot all of the sudden?

Once Honeymaren manages to gather herself Elsa can see the glistening of the firelight on her eyes, slightly watery from the laughter. They’re a wonderful light brown color almost like molten gold or… well, honey. Maybe that’s how she got her name?

“So,” it takes Elsa a second to snap back into reality-- Seriously, what is with her today? As if spooky voices calling her out into the Enchanted Forest aren’t enough to worry about-- “what exactly _does_ bring a mystical ice-fae into the impenetrable forest that no one has entered nor left in thirty-four years?”

“I think fae might be a bit of an overstatement,” she mutters, though it is far from the first time she’s wondered that or similar thoughts, “also, you remembered the bit about an ice palace, but not the reason we’re here in the first place?”

“To be fair, I zoned out at some point after the snowman tried to make out with the reindeer.”

“Olaf did what now?” Her face must’ve been impressive because Honeymaren barely manages to keep hers straight for two seconds. Then a grin splits her face and she's back into that laugh that makes Elsa feel warm. 

Her wrist throbs, that same throbbing burn that had been plaguing her just as long as the call to the forest.

“Looks like I wasn’t the only one who spaced out,” she snickers. Elsa glowers.

“I know the story, I was there.”

“You were there? If I recall you spent most of it either on a mountain or in the dungeon.”

“Oh, shush,” she lightly hits the other girl with her elbow and something in her chest explodes with warmth. Honeymaren just grins, even her smile is warm.

“Don’t think I haven’t noticed you dodging the question.” she jokingly pokes her back and the little reindeer in her lap lets out a small noise in protest to being disturbed. Honeymaren reaches down to scratch between his ears. “Why _are_ you here?”

Elsa lets out a breath, the cold causes it to turn to fog just centimeters from her mouth.

“There’s something calling me… I’m not sure what. All I know is that it has something to do with this forest.”

Honeymaren hums in thought and her brows draw together. The mirth in the curve of her lips vanishes to accompany the more serious expression, but for some reason Elsa can’t help but miss it.

“The queen of Arendelle is hearing voices that call her into a mystical forest that hasn’t been entered in more than three decades. I’d call you crazy if you didn’t somehow make it through the mist.” Her gaze snaps down to the scarf in her lap. “How about this?”

“It was my mother's,” she repeats, “Anna likes to carry it around it’s… comforting.”

“It belonged to one of our oldest families, y’know,” she makes a motion towards the cloth as if asking permission to touch. Elsa nods minutely and she scoops up the fabric with gentle hands. Her fingers are small but calloused like a soldier’s. “Oh, that’s interesting.”

“What?” Elsa snaps her gaze back to Honeymaren’s face, but she isn’t looking at her.

“Look,” she pushes the fabric in front of Elsa’s face, “You’ve got air, fire, water, and earth.” She points to the corresponding diamonds, “but in-between…”

“There’s a fifth spirit?” she questions and tries to catch her gaze in question. Honeymaren shrugs.

“That’s what some say…” she glances up to meet Elsa’s gaze and a smirk pulls across her lips slowly, some of that mirth magically back in place. “But, alas, only Ahtohollan knows.”

A half faded memory, but a memory none-the-less, breaks through the ice in the back of her mind.

“Ahtohollan…” she murmurs, trying to remember her mother’s lullaby. 

_“Where the North wind,_

_meets the sea…”_

_“There’s a river,”_ Honeymaren’s voice is even warmer than her laugh, and sweeter than anything she’s ever tasted.

_“Full of memory.”_

_“Dive down deep into her sound,_

_But not too far or you’ll be drowned.”_

She isn’t sure who starts laughing first, but it doesn’t really matter. They’re both chuckling at each other’s expense and Elsa hasn’t felt this whole since…

Well not since before she was locked away in her room.

“Why is it that all lullabies have to end with some terrible warning?” Honeymaren’s grin is infectious and Elsa finds herself with the same dopey smile plastered over her face. 

Her wrist won’t stop burning.

~

Ahtohollan is the single most beautiful place she’s seen in her life. It’s towering walls of white ice and if she hadn’t already suspected it before she even dove into the black waters outside she would have known the moment she entered the structure proper: this is where she comes from, this is who she is. She can feel it in the way that the walls part before her, how the columns of ice rise sky-high with little more than a flick of her fingers, how her feet slide across the smooth surface like she’s done it a thousand times.

This is where she’s supposed to be. _Who_ she is supposed to be and her wrist, uncovered and free, glistens like a thousand karats of gold.

But she can’t get distracted, she is here for answers and she is going to find them if it kills her.

A thousand memories swirl around her, some hers and some things she’s never seen. All made out of the same crystalline substance that she’s known her entire life. A snow version of her sister rushes by, laughing and arm in arm with a less enthusiastic version of herself. Kristoff dances by, lute clutched in his large hands. Olaf chuckles atop Sven's back whispering something about the sky. Elsa can’t pick one to focus on, they’re all so beautiful, all so chaotic, moments in time tripping over one another and through others. 

“Maren! Maren! Maren!” a voice shouts to her left and a young boy plops down on top of someone’s sleeping form. The person lets out a drawn-out ‘oof’ of air and sits up to push the little boy off of her. Not to be deterred, he bounces right back onto her. “MAAAAAREEEEEN!” He shouts in her ear and she groans dramatically before finally sitting up, hair sticking up in multiple directions.

“What?”

“It’s the day!”

“The day?” she questions and pulls a lock of hair out of her mouth.

“Our bondday!” He shouts impatiently and starts tugging on her wrist, “lemme see!”

Color floods to Elsa’s face as she realizes what she’s seeing, and she makes to turn away, but, much like the spirits of the forest, Ahtohollan has a mind of its own. A wall of ice appears in front of her, forcing her to turn back to the memory.

The boy stops bouncing suddenly, staring at the girl’s wrist with steadily more furrowed brows. The girl in question doesn’t even seem to realize that he’s reading it, she’s too busy falling back asleep.

“What does that say?” he says finally after a moment, giving up on trying to decipher it.

“Wha…?”

“Maren!”

She snaps awake once again, drooping head suddenly upright.

“What?”

“What does it say?!” he shoves her wrist in her face and she blinks a couple times, apparently it’s too close for her to read.

Elsa starts trying to get around the wall, but no matter where she moves more ice appears to stop her. She can feel the walls around her, urging her to stay and watch. She needs to see this for some reason.

The girl pulls the wrist away from her face and to a more respectable distance, then her own brows furrow.

“The hell?”

“Maren!” the boy complains and she blinks, glancing up as if she forgot he was there.

“Sorry Ry, just… I’ve got no idea what this says…”

Silence hangs, or at least as close to it as can be. Other memories shout and laugh, some cry, some sing, but between the little boy and the little girl there is silence. It is a questionable one, a worried one, and Elsa knows the look on her face, the look of someone coming to the only conclusion that makes sense. It hurts to see it on a face that isn’t her own.

“What about you?” she says suddenly, tugging her sleeve down to cover the mark. Her smile is easy, warm and genuine, but Elsa knows it’s not the end of the conversation, not the end of the moment.

The ice walls around her recede and, glad to be free, Elsa quickly flees the scene, she’s already seen more than she should.


	3. III

“You know, you belong here…” 

The words repeat in her head for days and she can’t, for the life of her, figure out why.

Perhaps it’s because they’re true, the following few days after her move to the forest prove it. She can hardly go a single moment before one of the four spirits has appeared to tug her along on some great adventure that makes her return to the Northuldra exhausted and exhilarated in a way that she never was in Arendelle.

Or, maybe it’s because Honeymaren was the one to say them. 

(Elsa hasn’t seen a lot of things in her life considering the kind of childhood she had, but what she has seen has cemented her as a connoisseur of the weird and unexplainable.

Ice powers that manifest spontaneously from two non-magical parents? Sure, why not. 

Creating a sentient snowman by accident that gets adopted into her family without so much as a question? But of course.

Create more sentient snow creatures when she came down with an absurdly bad cold once? Abso-freakin-lutely!

But what she saw in Ahtohollan is a different thing altogether. Ahtohollan was trying to tell her something, and, if she was being completely honest, she knew what she’d been shown. She knew what it meant, what the forest wanted her to understand.

She just ignored it.

It wasn’t something she could face, not now and, quite frankly, not ever. Her life was already a strange medley of what she did and didn’t understand, adding one more thing to that list could break her if she wasn’t careful.)

The woman in question (despite her concerns) quickly turns into a trusted companion unlike anyone else she’s ever known. Even with Anna she had to work for that kind of relationship, with Honeymaren (or Maren as she learns she prefers to be called, just more conversations to shove under the rug) all she has to do is be there, everything else falls into place. 

Maren takes her for all she is-- sharp edges, ice and all-- and only asks for her to give trust in return.

~

“Weird looking leaf you got there, Snowflake.” The nickname was given almost immediately upon reuniting from Ahtohollan and Elsa has not been able to convince her to call her anything else since.

“Ah, yes I’ve been collecting them. You see, in Arendelle we did not have such commodities so I’m trying to get a feel for how such things work,” she deadpans and receives a face-full of reindeer hyde in response.

“Shut up, smart-ass,” Maren’s voice is slightly muffled by the cloth and Elsa has to reach up to get the cap off of her eyes before she can respond.

“Very mature.” She can’t help the smile from coloring her voice, even if she means the comment to be somewhat biting. This is the nature of their friendship, teasing and smart comments that only end when another begins. It is different than the friendship she’d built with Anna and Kristoff, but it is true nonetheless. 

Maren is smiling too, but without the cap on her head her hair sticks up in an impressive range of directions, distracting her from fully taking it in.

“I meant, what do you have?” she indicates the paper in her hands once more. Elsa shrugs.

“Just a letter from Anna, I think she’s using Gale as her personal mail service.”

“Mail?”

“Messenger,” she corrects.

“Ah,” she answers and leans over to inspect the paper, then stills abruptly. “What the hell kind of glyphs are those?”

“Glyphs?” she questions. Maren looks at her confusion and she answers it with her own.

“Yeah, glyphs. Yours are weird, like, really weird. How do you read that?”

Elsa blinks, it hadn’t occurred to her there was a distinct lack of writing in the Northuldra camp. Perhaps she’d been too distracted by gallivanting around with her newfound powers and spirit friends, but now that she thought on it she wasn’t sure she’d even seen paper.

“It’s called letters," she tries to explain, “See, here Anna’s written these little symbols, each corresponds to a sound in our language, when you put them all together they make a word.”

Maren’s nose wrinkles. “Sounds complicated, why not just use a single symbol for the word and be done with it?”

“There are too many words, it would be impossible to remember them all.”

“Well you don’t have to write every word,” Maren argued, “If I just say 'fish north,' you know what I mean.”

“I suppose…” Elsa mutters, unconvinced. “Wait, what does your writing look like?”

“I’ll show you later,” she waves a hand dismissively. “Now what does it say?”

~

Later turns out to be _much_ later. Mostly because things got busy and fast. 

Cutting off the forest from the surrounding lands for thirty-four years had resulted in some unforeseen consequences and she spent weeks on end running all over the forest to try and help reintegrate the woods with the surrounding area. The other four spirits could do a lot without her, but they were limited by the factor of not having thumbs (or in the Earth giant’s case, having too large thumbs).

It was only after the fourth week, once she realized that she hadn’t been back to the Northuldra camp for more than two weeks, that it occurred to her that she still didn’t know how Northuldran writing worked. 

It was inconvenient at the time, mostly because she was still up to her neck in work and didn’t know how to send a message to camp that they would be able to read, but she decided that she’d cross that bridge once she got back.

~

A week later and she still hadn’t gotten a chance to go back. 

Anna had written a letter asking if she could make it to game-night and she’d politely declined, questioning why she had to be stupid and not learn how to communicate efficiently with the people she lived with. It was still a problem for later though, her work was getting harder instead of easier. 

She found herself wading through bogs, trying to redirect the water that threatened the dens of a family of badgers, but her efforts were slow going and there were just so many animals to relocate. It was starting to look like she’d be lucky if she made it back to the Northuldra camp before spring.

~

The next week yielded much of the same, but now Elsa was tired. Very, very tired. Exhausted was probably a better word, but that would mean acknowledging she should take a break, which she refused to. The sooner she finished the sooner she could return to camp and the sooner this gnawing guilt that she was causing unnecessary worry would go away. She wasn’t sure why, but her wrist had started burning again last week.

It was concerning, to say the least.

~

Another week and Elsa couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen someone that wasn’t an animal or a spirit. 

It seemed that even Gale and Bruni were beginning to get concerned. Gale had tried to deter her from lifting a few fallen nests back into trees, and she’d responded by creating a vortex of ice around herself that kept the wind spirit away. 

Once, only once, she thought she heard a call in the forest, not too different than the one that brought her there in the first place, but it sounded… different. 

Not unfamiliar, she knew it, she knows that she did, but she hadn’t been able to place it at the time. Then she’d heard the call of a distant flock of birds and taken off after it, no time to get caught up in a mysterious forest voice. 

The irony of the sentiment was not lost on her.

~

She’d only ever felt this tired once, when the ice of Ahtohollan had closed around her limbs and forced her under, taking with it her vision and sense of self, leaving nothing but a frozen empty shell behind. This wasn’t quite that drastic, she told herself, but she did feel that tired. 

Her limbs were lead and the tree she’d slid down to rest on was simultaneously the softest thing she’d rested against and the most uncomfortable. She could feel each divet of the bark, each patch of earth poking through the snow beneath her. All of it was too hard, and too sharp, and soft, and welcoming. She felt like vertigo was overtaking her, the earth spinning faster and faster, but all she could do was close her eyes. Something warm pressed against her hand, but she couldn’t muster the strength to react to it. 

The cold overtook her.

~

“What do we do?”

“Do I loOK LIKE I KNOW WHAT TO DO, RYDER?!”

“Don’t yell at me! It’s not my fault your girlfriend went off into the forest and-”

“She’s not my girlfriend!”

“Well she’s clearly important to you and when she disappeared you nearly tore the forest apart looking for her, so you tell me what you two are.”

“Shut your fucking yap before I break it.”

~

She wakes up warm with a dry throat and aching temples. 

“Ugh,” the noise comes from her without her express permission only to be immediately drowned out by something pressing against her lips. She doesn’t have the presence of mind to question it, and so she swallows the warm salty substance poured down her throat.

She makes a face.

“Yeah, well get used to it, because it’s all you’re getting until you can keep something else down,” a voice mutters off to her left and she has a hard time placing it.

Her eyes flutter. The room is dark. There is light, candles, but her brain is sluggish and they scarcely provide enough to see more than the faint outline of a person’s face.

“Where…?” she rasps. The other person lets out a sigh that could move mountains.

“Back with the Northuldra you colossal moron. What the hell did you think was going to happen when you ran off into the woods for two months?!”

Only two people talk to her like that and one of them is none-the-wiser to her little excursion.

“Maren…” she mutters, relief coloring her tone more than she cares to admit.

“Don’t you 'Maren' me!” The woman in question seems annoyed, but there is a fondness to the tilt of her brow, a relief coloring the edges of her words and Elsa decides to focus on those.

“Needed to… relocate… stuff…” she tries to rasp in way of explanation, but her throat is so dry and every word feels like a battle that she barely manages to win by the skin of her teeth. 

Maren presses a bowl against her lips, and she drinks the broth without complaint.

“Doesn’t matter what you needed to do, you scared the living shit out of me,” she grumbles, then backtracks, “er, I mean you scared the shit out of your spirit friends…”

The bowl is retracted from her face and a piece of cloth is pressed against her forehead, followed by a hand.

“‘S fine…” she argues. 

Maren’s silhouette stills for a second before responding in a voice deeper and more dangerous than she’s ever heard from the woman. “Your fingers had turned blue and you hadn’t eaten anything in weeks to the point that your body had started to eat itself. When we found you, your heartbeat was so weak I thought that you were…” 

The end of the sentence is a harsh, broken thing. Voice jagged like glass, Just as quickly as the anger had appeared it left, leaving behind the hunched figure of a woman who had nearly worried herself to death.

Slowly, Elsa forces one of her hands to come up and curl against Maren’s face.

“Not… human… remember?” She rasps.

She can feel the muscles in Maren’s face pulling into a smile, but she knows that it’s weak.

“Maybe,” Maren’s own hand comes up to rest against hers, “but I’d rather you not test your limits, not while I’m still here worrying after you, okay?”

Something cold settles in Elsa’s stomach.

“What… does… that… mean…?” she coughs the last word out like it burns her throat. Maren presses a cup against her mouth and she lets the cool water slide down her throat. 

“It means that you’re a moron and if you worry me like that again Bruni and Gale can drag you back here themselves.”

Elsa has the distinct impression that is not what she meant.

~

Maren decided that the best way to medicate the problem of Elsa being a massive workaholic was to teach her Northuldra writing so that she could write letters to her guilting her into returning to the camp. 

At least that was what Elsa assumes she meant, she wasn’t exactly cognizant for much of that first week she’d returned to camp.

“Look, it’s pretty simple, you don’t have to learn the whole language, just a few simple phrases,” Maren assures her, but the scrolls of fabric littering every surface that Elsa can see say otherwise.

“Maren, I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t think it’s necessary-” she tries to interject that she’s learned her lesson. She’s not about to try to wander off into the woods again. Not for another couple of months at least.

“You also apparently didn’t think you needed to eat, so I think we both know you're not the best judge of what is and isn’t necessary.” Her face is deadpan and there is no room for argument in her tone so Elsa decides to just shut up.

“Okay, so there’s two main kinds of Northuldran writing,” Maren unfurls one of the rolls of fabric.

Something cold and hard drops in the pit of her stomach.

She isn’t sure, but it feels an awful lot like dread. 

The cloth contains a few clusters of colorfully stitched diamonds.

_Stitched diamonds._

Elsa’s stomach does a backflip inside of her abdomen and that cold, hard thing hits each and every single rib inside of her ribcage.

“Shorthand,” Maren points to the bottom few clusters of diamonds, seemingly unnoticing of the increasingly pale person sitting in front of her, “which we use for communication, short-term record keeping, and decoration.” Her hand drops the fabric and picks up another. The clusters are replaced with rows and rows of smaller diamonds, each stitched so finely it’s difficult to even see the embroidery. 

“And Traditional. We use this for long term records, detailed messages, and individual signatures.”

Elsa feels like she’s going to be sick.

Anna’s words are ringing through her head so loudly she can’t hear herself think.

_Maybe drawn isn’t the right word. It looks a little more like… stitching, maybe?_ Why the hell did she never question it, why the fuck did she never question it? **_Why the actual fuck?!_ **

“Uh… Elsa…?”

Elsa takes a full thirty seconds to snap back into the present. The entire tent is covered in a thin layer of frost and Maren is wrestling with the roll of fabric she’d been holding which is now frozen to her fingertips.

_“Sorry, sorry!”_

She dispels the frost, but she can’t dispel the weight that has settled in her chest.

  
~

_Dear Sister,_

_It’s a signature._

_Signed,_

_Elsa_

**Dearer Sister,**

**What on earth are you talking about?**

**Your concerned sister,**

**Anna**

_Dearest Sister,_

_My wrist._

_Elsa_

**Sister,**

**OH SHI-**

~

The remainder of Anna’s letter is a mess of scribbled expletives followed by ‘I’M COMING THERE RIGHT NOW YOU LITTLE-!!!’ She always had been the more loquacious of the two of them, but she still manages to capture Elsa’s feelings exactly.

She hasn’t told Maren. 

Oh, part of her knows that she should have, that she is nowhere close to being able to understand Northuldran script herself and that Maren is the only person in the tribe she trusts not to laugh at her for assuming that it wasn’t an actual signature for the last twelve years. 

But that memory…

Why would Ahtohollan show her that memory if not because they were the same? What did it mean, that for the last twelve years she’d agonized over the thought that she was marked as alone for life, only to know that it was all just a horrific misunderstanding? Why didn’t her mother tell her? Surely she was able to at least recognize the script, even if she’d forgotten how to read it?

_Maybe she didn’t want you to get your hopes up? The forest had been sealed for 22 years at that point, what were the chances you’d be able to ever meet your soulmate even if they did exist, trapped behind a blanket of impenetrable fog?_

Questions, questions, questions. Each less helpful than the last. Elsa had just barely managed to get herself through the remainder of Honeymaren’s lesson without covering the entire tent in another blanket of ice and she knows she’s not going to be up to the task of trying that again any time soon.

It’s ironic, she thinks, the position she finds herself in now: curled into a ball in the center of a bed, surrounded by ice that wound itself around her entire body, fingers curled over the diamonds inscribed in her left wrist.

Maren had mentioned something about the color, when in signatures, designated the family the signature was from, then laughed when mentioning that Elsa’s signature would be purple...

_Gold..._

_Like honey._

She knew what her signature said, she had since she’d gone to Ahtohollan.

The ice grows thicker by the minute.

* * *

Maren was having a… concerning day.

To start, she’d woken up that morning to find Bruni trying to make a nest in her hair, which wouldn’t have been that big of a deal if the lizard wasn’t the spirit of fire and could set _her_ on fire if he wasn’t careful. 

Then Ryder had dumped an entire week’s worth of fish on the ground, forcing her to spend the first few hours of the morning rinsing them off and judging what could and couldn’t be saved.

Next, she’d had her lesson with Elsa which had gone… strange. She wasn’t above admitting that her interest in the woman was more than just friendly, but she’d thought that they’d reached a friendly foundation in their relationship at least. Now, she wasn’t so sure. It’d started fine, Elsa had gone along with her teasing as she always did, even countered it with her own, up until she’d shown her the actual characters that they used for writing. Suddenly, Elsa’s expression had gone blank and for the rest of the lesson, it was impossible to get more than one word out of the woman at a time. She wasn’t even sure she’d heard a thing she’d said.

After the lesson, the pain had started up again. It shouldn’t have been all that surprising, it had shown its face only a week before, but it still made her feel uneasy whenever it did. 

(She’d heard tales before, the elders whispered of bonded pairs that were so close they could feel each other’s pain or shared stress and emotion between the two of them.

She knew the script on her wrist, maybe not the individual belonged to, but she recognized it as the Roman alphabet, at least that was what Yelena had called it when she’d shown it to her after her Bondday, and she knew that whenever it burned like that-- with that ice-cold ferocity that made her want to pull the flesh from her wrist-- whoever was on the other side of the bond was hurting. It had only ever burned with such ferocity four times: once when she was eighteen, once when she was twenty-one, once after Elsa and the Arendellian crown came to the forest, and a week ago.

She didn’t like that it was back again so soon.)

Then Yelena had dragged her around the campsite for a good hour and a half, forcing her to go through check-list after check-list. (Winter wasn’t anything to sneeze at, she knew that, but most of the items on the list just seemed excessive at this point. They had the spirit of ice living among them, they could afford to relax, just the slightest.) Until they’d come across a wall of ice in the middle of the forest which they both would have blamed on their resident ice-sprite if they hadn’t been watching her for the past week and a half.

“The hell?” she’d voiced while Yelena paced the length of it, poking it with her staff which just proved to show that the wall was at least a foot or two thick.

“What’s the name of her little water horse?” Yelena questioned after a moment and Maren had to wrack her brain for a hot second.

“Uh… Nokk…?”

Yelena rubbed at her chin. “I suppose they might be setting up precautions… you said she was acting weird earlier?”

Maren nodded but was unconvinced.

Upon returning to her side of camp she’d relaxed, ready to just go fishing and not worry about anything else in this… strange day, when the universe decided that it didn’t like that plan.

Or rather, Gale decided they didn’t like that plan when they dumped the Queen of Arendelle on top of her.

“Sorry-!” Anna’s voice sounds from somewhere above her, but Maren’s too busy spitting clods of dirt and snow out of her mouth to register much more than that single word. Hands hook beneath her arms and yank her upwards with much more strength than she would’ve imagined from the woman in question.

“-I guess I wasn’t specific enough when I said, ‘take me to Elsa.’ Maybe I should be grateful that Gale didn’t just dump me on top of her tent-” Anna’s tirade is unstoppable, continuing through every action she executes like her mouth doesn’t know what to do other than make sound.

“Your Highness-” she starts, but it goes straight over the woman’s head, or rather, under her current of sound. She’s started pacing back and forth, gesticulating wildly with her hands like she doesn’t know what to do with them. 

“I was just so surprised and in shock that I didn’t think about it! I can’t believe that after all this time it was actually a signature! She has to be freaking out about it right now-”

“Your Maj-”

“I mean, can you believe it?! Twelve years and it never even occurred to us!”

“Wha-”

“We didn’t even check?! Why didn’t we check? That book on Mom and Dad’s ship has the same lettering, why the hell didn’t we notice?!”

“Anna!” she shouts, finally having enough of the words. Her head is still throbbing from its collision with the ground, it can’t take this tidal wave of words that make little to no sense without context. 

The Queen’s jaw snaps shut with the click of teeth. 

Maren lets out a breath and reaches up to massage her temples. “What on Earth are you talking about?”

Anna blinks, once, twice, three times.

“Oh shit, she didn’t tell you?”

“Didn’t tell me what?” Maren’s too tired for all of this. Too tired and too confused, Elsa might be pretty and cool and the most interesting person she’s met in her entire life, but does that mean she’s going to entertain every piece of nonsense that seems to involve the woman?

(The answer is yes, a thousand times yes, but she’s not about to admit that to herself yet. Not until she’s sure that the other woman won’t find her affections disheartening.)

Anna’s started pacing again.

“Why wouldn’t she tell you? It’s not like she can read it... unless of course, she can, which might be how she figured out it was a signature in the first place, but then why didn’t she tell me she was learning Northuldran script? Did she not think that I’d be curious or want to as well? Or that it just wasn’t relevant information? Or maybe she thinks you know who it is! But then what’s the big deal? That’s a good thing! You can introduce her or-”

“Anna.” 

Her feet stop so suddenly in the snow they leave skid marks.

“Oh. That’s why.”

Anna’s eyes have settled on something in the distance and it takes her a moment to follow her gaze to what she’s watching.

The tent that Elsa had been sitting in less than an hour before is now encased almost entirely in ice. 

Something heavy settles in the pit of Maren’s stomach and the burning in her wrist drops another couple degrees. Her feet are moving before she can even fully process the emotion, Anna hot on her heels.

* * *

“Elsa, we are NOT playing the fucking door game again!!” Anna shouts through the wood, but she gets no answer.

“Get away from the door,” Honeymaren growls and she barely has time to retreat before a long, thick log slams into the ice-covered wood with enough force to rock the tent.

“WHAT THE HELL, HONEYMAREN?!” Anna shouts.

“You want to get in there, don’t you?”

“I don’t want to break her door down!”

The look that Honeymaren gives her is nothing short of murderous.

“Well I’m not sure we’ve got much choice in how we get in, she can be awfully stubborn when she wants to be.”

“I lived with her for twenty-one years, I know. But intruding on her when she’s not ready for it isn’t going to help anyone and only going to result in one of us turning into a person-shaped-popsicle-!”

“Two months ago she ran off into the woods without telling anyone and we were only able to find her once she passed out and her spirit friends dragged me to her.”

Silence.

“If you can’t break this fucking door down I’m going to go get that fire-lizard of hers-”

The doorway of ice drops out of existence faster than she can say another expletive, an ice-cold hand hooks around her wrist, and she’s tugged off of her feet and into the tent. The ice-door reconstructs itself behind her.

“Anna,” Elsa starts and her face is paler than she’s ever seen it, “It’s a **_signature…_ **”

Her voice cracks on the word like she’s never said it before and Anna’s heart breaks right then and there.

“Oh, Elsa…”

“I don’t know what to do!” Her sister is not someone to raise her voice. Now she shouts with enough force to shake the tent, ice spreading outwards from her feet and crawling over any and every surface it can find. Her hands fly upwards, grabbing at the roots of her hair and tugging like she might be able to pull the panic taking hold out of her. “Twelve years! Twelve years wasted in… in anguish, because I was so sure that I was alone, that the universe had marked me as undesirable and now it’s like none of that even **_matters!_ **”

Her voice cracks again and Anna tries to quell the rising storm before her.

“Elsa-”

“None of it even matters because it was all just a shitty fucking-”

Anna catches her sister’s face between her hands and her tirade cuts out abruptly.

“Listen to me,” she growls, face close enough that she can see her sister's breath escaping her in small puffs of air. “Nothing has changed.”

“Everything has changed!” Elsa protests, though slightly muffled.

“No. It hasn’t,” Anna assures and begins tugging her frantic and ice-spewing sister towards the bed. “Okay, so it’s a signature, that’s new information, but not a new mark. It is the same one that has always been there, and you are the same person that it has always belonged to.” 

Elsa sinks onto the bed with little more than a push and Anna carefully drops to her knees before it, taking her sister’s hands in her own.

“I know it seems like everything is different now, but it’s not. The earth is still spinning, the sun is still rising, the grass is still growing, everything is just as it always was. New information doesn’t stop that, just explains it.”

Slowly, she tugs her sister’s left sleeve up to reveal the small golden diamonds beneath. She can feel Elsa stiffening beneath her, and makes sure that she’s being as gentle as possible as she traces them.

“This is the same mark that’s been on your skin for twelve years, the same color, the same pattern...” She stops on one of the diamonds and carefully counts the threads with the tip of her fingernail. “It’s just now we know that it says someone’s name. It always has, we just didn’t know.”

When she looks back up to meet her sister’s gaze it’s wet and more terrified than she’s seen it in three years. Anna’s grip tightens on her hand.

“Nothing has changed, Elsa. I meant it when I told you that this,” she runs her thumb over the mark, “didn’t matter. You’re my sister and you aren’t any less or more loved than you were before we figured this out.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Up Next: The Epilogue


	4. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Has anyone stopped to question is Elsa is kinda... y'know, Immortal now?!?

The ice carved woman steps forwards, brow furrowed in worry and hands gesticulating wildly as words from a language lost to time spew endlessly out of a mouth that Elsa knows like the back of her hand. 

She’s watched the scene before her countless times, to the point she can remember the scene this way (Third person and watching as her snow-double stutters through something resembling an explanation before resorting to grabbing the other woman’s hand, tugging her sleeve down, and placing her own wrist next to hers so that the ice-carved one can see the matching marks.) better than she can remember it happening in front of her own two eyes.

_A little over two centuries will do that to you,_ she thinks, humorless.

The ice-carved woman’s face flushes, or rather, the ice and snow that made up the woman’s cheeks thicken to give the illusion of darkening skin. Suddenly her hand, which was still suspended in the air mid-gesture dropped back to her face, landing just over her mouth as useless gibberish struggles to escape it.

Only then does Elsa feel the barest beginnings of a smile spread across her face.

“Everything okay?” A voice calls, interrupting her reprieve.

It takes more effort than it should to pull her gaze away from the scene before her and settle it on the woman carefully making her way across the ice to join her. Her dark hair is tucked up in her stocking cap, but locks of it still escape, falling down her face and into those mischievous eyes that she’s grown so fond of over the years.

As she makes to stand next to her Elsa takes a moment to relish the fact that this time the height difference is stacked in her favor. Her shorter companion takes in the scene before them (Elsa's snow-double is now gesticulating just as wildly as the ice-carved woman was before, cheeks flushed just as darkly as her companion’s. The other woman now has both hands clamped over her face and is letting out great grumbling moans in that language that she hasn’t heard in years but remembers boils down to ‘I’m so stupid!’) and immediately starts chuckling.

“This is from the first go-around, right?” She looks up at Elsa and she can’t resist the urge to reach out and pull the woman’s scarf down so she can see the bottom half of her face, leaning down to plant a kiss there as she goes.

“I’m surprised you remember that far back,” she whispers upon accomplishing her mission and Maren laughs that warm laugh that remains the same no matter what life she is currently living.

“It’s kinda hard to forget.” Maren’s arm comes up to wrap around her waist, staring at their counterparts as they frantically try to calm each other down and in the process only seem to make their frantic motions worse. “God you were such a disaster gay.”

Elsa leans away to settle Maren with a glare.

“And you weren’t?” she argues only to receive a snort in response.

“I’ve had to go through my baby gay phase five times, you can let me make fun of yours.”

Elsa lets out a snort that turns into frost in Ahtohollan’s air. 

“I still do not understand half of what you people say these days.”

“You seriously need to brush up on your internet culture,” Maren jokingly jabs her in the side, “even mysterious forest cryptids need to know the joys of internet memes.”

“I’m going to stop you right there before you try explaining why pictures of a sad puppet frog are so funny again.” She reaches up and shoves Maren’s cap down on top of her head. Maren lets out a yelp of protest before reaching up and grabbing the hood of Elsa’s parka and pulling it down over her eyes in retaliation.

Elsa flicks her fingers to the side in an easy loose motion and watches as Honeymaren’s smug grin turns into a panicked expression before her legs slip out from beneath her and she makes a thunderous thunking noise against the ice. The scene of the snow-clones before them jostles slightly as, in the middle of one of her frantic gestures, ice-Maren ends up whacking ice-Elsa in the face and sending her falling flat on her back in a perfect mirror of the woman now sprawled at Elsa’s feet. Yes, Ahtohollan truly does have a sense of humor sometimes.

“Did you forget where your feet are?” she asks the heap of limbs beneath her and Maren responds by showing her one of her fingers.

Elsa finally lets the laugh come up from her chest, rolling around in a ruckus of uncontained mirth that she finds comes easier and easier the longer she lives. Joy is a hard thing to find in life when you’re constantly haunted by the specter of death, but once that specter had become a distant memory, Elsa finds it much easier to focus on what she finds joy in now.

Like watching her girlfriend attempt to find her footing on the slick ice beneath her without the help of the ice spikes that she’d so painstakingly latched to her boots that morning before they set out for the glacier that Elsa has called home for the past two hundred years.

The laughter slips away, fading into the thousands of other echoes of laughter long since passed, hundreds of thousands of other memories clamoring to be heard, to be remembered, to be experienced within the hallowed halls of Ahtohollan. Thousands of memories and so many of them are hers.

“Does it ever bother you?” she asks finally, once the echo of laughter has faded and the many, many memories have gone back into their muted chatter that they keep up when she’s not focusing on them. Slowly, Maren pulls herself back into a standing position, cracking her back in the process. She doesn’t answer right away, instead, she fixes Elsa with that look that says: _I can’t tell you anything until you learn to speak less cryptically._

It’s a look that’s become more and more common as Elsa ages. (or rather, fails to age.)

“Knowing that no matter what path you take you’ll always end up back here… with me?” Elsa remembers a time, long, long ago, when Ahtohollan had seemed so big to her, how she thought she’d never be able to explore it all before her death. Now, she knows the halls like the back of her hand, and though she is content here, it is also small here. 

* * *

Maren hums pensively, letting her eyes wander over the many other Marens and Elsas scattered among the memories. A tall Maren with a rugged face, scars sliding down the sides of her arms, bows low to the ground, a single rose clutched in an outstretched hand. A slightly more feminine looking one offers a shy hand, grin twisting the edges of her lips. A young woman with a bright smile lays with her hands pressed over a twisted piece of frosted metal, darkened ice tricking beneath her legs and down the sides of her mouth. An older Maren holds Elsa’s hand, spinning her through a dance that she’s forgotten the steps to. 

A younger one, this one much more familiar than the rest, stands in front of an Elsa in modern clothes, face flushed bright as she fidgets with the binders in her hands.

_“I’m so sorry I just... you… I… we… I mean… Uhm… have we met before?”_ Her voice squeaks on the tail end of the sentence while Elsa watches her with that knowing, fond smile.

_“Care to find out?”_ The ice-goddess asks and offers her hand to the blushing, frantic student and Maren can’t help but try and reconcile the woman she’s come to know in this life with the one that she remembers from her first.

The first Maren is frantically trying to apologize to the youngest Elsa, waving her hands frantically while the woman lays dazed on the forest floor and a snow version of Elsa’s sister laughs in the background.

Times really have changed.

“I find it reassuring,” she answers finally, turning to settle Elsa, her Elsa, with that smile that she knows makes the other woman stop pacing around in her mind like an anxious cat. “You do know how many people spend their entire lives looking for their bonded?”

Elsa sighs, rubbing self-consciously at the marks on her left wrist, ascending from the golden diamonds in the crook of her wrist more and more golden ink outlines the signatures of each of her lives that came before.

“I know just… being bound to an immortal Ice-being wouldn’t be my first choice…”

“Lucky for you, it isn’t.” Maren reaches out to catch Elsa’s hands and tug her with her, back towards the entrance to Ahtohollan. “But it is mine.”

The sigh that comes from the woman is more of a defeated chuckle and the hands held loosely in her own turn to intertwine their fingers together. Maren will never fully understand how the woman can be so cold and never too cold to touch.

“You are always so stubborn,” she mutters, fond and warm and all of the things that no one would ever expect from the Ice Queen of myth. Maren just smiles because she knows that those are exactly the things that the Ice Queen of myth is. 

“That’s why you love me.”

The Ice Queen grabs her by the scarf and captures her lips with her own.

And Maren lets her fingers slide up Elsa’s arm to rest on her own signature, tucked safely against the crook of the woman’s elbow. She smiles because she knows that there are many, many more signatures to come.


End file.
